Password and Hash Encryption using DuckDuckGo Search Engine

A Private search engine DuckDuckGo claims that when you click on one of their search results, they do not send personally identifiable information along with your request to the third party.

Like Google dorks (advance search patterns), there are thousands of similar, but technically more useful search hacks are also available in DuckDuckGo called DuckDuckGoodies. Today I am going to share about Handy "Cryptography" using DuckDuckGo search engine.

Duckduckgo is a search engine which gives you a flexibility to perform such operations. It enables user to generate the hash of strings, find the algorithm used for generating a hash, give other equivalent hashes of certain hash input. You can also generate strong password by just searching on DuckDuckGo search engine.

Here are some Cryptography tricks using DuckDuckGo Search Engine

1.) Generating a Strong Password:
No password is foolproof, but by using a long, unique and strong password you can make your password complicated enough to slow down password cracking programs. DuckDuckGo provides you a feature of generating a strong password instantly.

Search Term: password 15 strong

Where 15 is the password length.

2.) Generating a Hash: Hashing makes it difficult for an attacker to retrieve the original plain text string back from the encrypted password and it lets sites keep a list of hashes, rather than plain text passwords.

Using DuckDuckGo's Handy option, you can generate a hash value of any string just by using the following syntax on the search engine.

Where blogmytuts is the plain text string and sha512 or sha is the hashing algorithm.

3.) Identifying Hash Algorithm: Manual finding of the algorithm used for generating the hash is a tedious task. DuckDuckGo provides you an inbuilt hash identification tool, which allows you to identify the hashing algorithm used for generating the hash string given as input.

Search Term :

hash 4d76e126896c73f3a51bb910dfc791a4d9fa5075

Where 4d76e126896c73f3a51bb910dfc791a4d9fa5075 is the hashes.

4.) Finding Plain text from Hashes: One more great feature provided by DuckDuckGo search engine is that it gives you plain text value and equivalent hash code in other algorithms. DuckDuckGo is not cracking hashes for you, but actually matches the hash value of the previously leaked database archive.

Search Term:

leakdb df2894fc405edfee0e0d506629cd9dfc

Where df2894fc405edfee0e0d506629cd9dfc is the hashing algorithm and leakdb the exploit keyword.